San Jose, California-based ControlUp, an IT infrastructure management, monitoring, and troubleshooting platform, today announced that it raised $100 million co-contributed by K1 Investment Management and JVP, bringing its total raised to $140 million. CEO Asaf Ganot says that the investment will enable ControlUp to expand its employee headcount while supporting ongoing product development efforts.

“This injection of capital will accelerate our ability to help more enterprises open the door to the limitless possibilities of a simpler, more reliable work-from-anywhere experience,” Ganot said in a statement. “We give IT real-time visibility into system status, with the ability to resolve help desk calls faster, and even handle potential system issues before they happen. All this translates to fewer headaches, lower costs, higher productivity, and happier people.”

ControlUp’s tranche comes as IT teams struggle to contend with remote and hybrid work setups emerging during the pandemic. According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey, 17% of employers say that the shift to remote work hasn’t been successful for their company. Among the other headaches are security and governance vulnerabilities — 45% of professionals expect their company to suffer a data breach during the pandemic due to staff using personal devices that aren’t properly protected.

ControlUp aims to address the growing challenges with a software-as-a-service product that collects device metrics (e.g., CPU, RAM, bandwidth, and I/O usage; protocol latency; and app load time) to help customers troubleshoot and remediate software issues. The platform collects up to one year of virtual desktop interface, server, and device environment data, analyzing it to proactively warn of potential issues with the availability of enterprise resources including domain name servers, file shares, and print services.

Device monitoring

ControlUp was founded in 2008 by Ganot and Yoni Avital, who began their careers at a Citrix services company implementing end-user computing projects. While there, they built tools that helped expose common technical problems in virtual desktop environments, which became the cornerstone of ControlUp’s current product offering.

ControlUp provides telemetry dashboards, updated every few seconds, that highlight and help to fix problems with virtual desktops and apps — for example, slow app response. IT admins can leverage search and grouping options to show resources as they change states or opt for automated actions and scripts that clean up temp directories, expand disk size, log off idle users, and more.

ControlUp’s “top insights” pane summarizes findings through widgets that spotlight anomalies, key performance indicators, and other metrics that could impact performance. The metrics are compared against both internal averages and a “global benchmark” consisting of anonymized data aggregated from all ControlUp’s enterprise customers. ControlUp uses the data to, among other things, provide AI-driven recommendations for increasing or decreasing assigned CPU and RAM to machines, and to answer granular questions like “Is my user’s profile load time phase long or short compared to other organizations with SSD storage?”

“By analyzing data from tens of thousands of troubleshooting sequences and continuously improving its machine learning algorithms, [ControlUp] recommends the shortest drill down path to uncover the root cause of [a] problem,” the company says on its website. “ControlUp’s … real-time engine connects to a multitude of data sources using flexible and expandable data collectors that cover a wide array of architectures and technologies. It utilizes a high performance in-memory database in order to digest, associate, and correlate hundreds of thousands of records in a single node.”

Expanding market

A 2021 Omdia survey predicts that, going forward, only 24% of knowledge workers will be permanently based in a office and working from a single desk. This is likely to further strain IT departments already struggling to adapt to the new norm. According to Riverbed, 94% of companies experienced technology problems that impacted their business while employees worked remotely, particularly disconnections from corporate networks, slow file downloads, and long response times when loading apps.

Against this backdrop, business has been booming for 250-employee ControlUp, which says it’s seen 50% revenue growth and 67% growth in enterprise accounts year-over-year, with over 1 million new seats deployed around the world. While it competes with 1E, Nexthink, and Lakeside, ControlUp notes that it currently supports over 5 million devices across 1,500 customers including four of the top five U.S. health insurance companies and five of the top eight US health care companies.

“The pandemic amplified the complexities of supporting employees when they started working from remote locations. These issues have been significant — and our solutions help,” Ganot told VentureBeat via email. “While [the pandemic] did not create the ‘work from anywhere’ trends, we have seen this experience accelerated. Enterprises across industries and around the world are looking closely at how they solve these problems. ControlUp is focused on helping companies give their people the freedom and flexibility to work from anywhere. We do this by empowering IT teams to optimize remote environments, prevent user downtime, and resolve issues faster. Ultimately, we enable businesses deliver an outstanding digital employee experience.”